Dooney’s Pub Taps Into Repeat Business with SMS and Email Marketing

Dooney’s Pub is a family-owned business in Southern New Jersey. Founded by Jim & Mary Dooney in 2011, the pub has been managed by Director of Operations Ariane Bonnes since 2017, when she left a career in New York City to run the establishment where she’d worked as a bartender during college.

Bonnes took over managerial duties while the restaurant was building out its second location. One of the first things she did to prepare for growth was launch a new website on BentoBox.

“I liked it because the back end was intuitive,” Bonnes says. She worked with BentoBox’s design team to get exactly the design she had envisioned and “seamlessly” added the second Dooney’s location when it opened in Voorhees, NJ in 2018.

When COVID required Dooney’s to start offering delivery, the BentoBox Marketing & Commerce platform’s Takeout & Delivery module not only opened a direct ordering channel, but let the restaurant manage the full delivery lifecycle.

“The ability to gather customer feedback has been really big for us,” Bonnes says. “It allows my managers to reach out to the customer and fix any issues before they go to Google to review us.”

With the website and online ordering channel up and running, Bonnes turned on additional BentoBox platform modules to sell Gift Cards, event Tickets, merchandise eCommerce, and even to accept job applications.

More recently, Dooney’s began using the platform for Events Management. “It was hard getting people to transition away from the binder,” Bonnes laughs. “But BentoBox has made private events a lot easier. The customer has to click the menu items to submit the booking, so that information is there every time.” The ease of use inspired the restaurant to start hosting more events: everything from birthday parties to ticketed comedy shows.

But even though BentoBox had become Dooney’s Swiss Army knife, Dooney’s only recently began the most powerful application of the platform yet.

For years, Bonnes has run marketing campaigns. She’s used all the conventional channels to promote the restaurant: billboards, radio ads, social media. She also used MailChimp for email marketing and EZ Texting for SMS marketing.

When BentoBox launched its own SMS Marketing and Email Marketing modules, Bonnes made the switch right away.

“When I saw BentoBox rolling out email marketing, I wanted to consolidate my services,” she says. “It made sense for me to do emailing and texting from BentoBox.”

With so many direct channels open at once, Bonnes knew Dooney’s BentoCore database was full of customers waiting to be reached out to. “BentoBox takes all that information and puts it in our database,” she says. “When they order from us or go through a form on the site, that becomes our customer.”

“It’s nice,” says Bonnes. “On social media or with a billboard or a commercial, I’m reaching people who could potentially be a new customer. But with email and SMS marketing, I’m sending people who are already our customers information about promotions and what’s coming up this week.”

Bonnes is launching her BentoBox email marketing at the most wonderful time of the year for an Irish-style pub. “We have St. Patrick’s Day coming up, so I’m going to start blasting out our programming and menu changes and stuff,” she says. “I’m getting ready for a big month.”

After the successful rollout of an email promoting pub-branded apparel, which resulted in a six-fold increase in merchandise sales, Bonnes is set up to make every upcoming holiday big.

“I try to operate with a focus on efficiency,” Bonnes says. “Every day, my job is to figure out how to make things easier so we can do more. BentoBox is what helps me do that.”